Toshiba’s NEW CIBSE Approved CPD programme

Toshiba’s NEW CIBSE Approved CPD ~ Module 146: Ensuring safe, environmentally sensitive refrigerants for building services applications.

This module explores the demanding practical requirements for efficient and safe refrigerants and the application of lower-flammability refrigerants.

Reducing the environmental impact of the built environment is driving technological changes in refrigerants as well as influencing professional and public realities of life-cycle risk assessment and moderation. This has generated renewed activity in the development and rediscovery of refrigerants that, in a world previously ignorant of the challenges of ozone depletion and global warming, would have not have been considered for HVAC system applications because of concerns about flammability.

This CPD article will consider the increasingly demanding practical requirements for efficient and safe refrigerants that are ushering in pragmatic acceptance of the lower-flammability refrigerants, and methodology to ensure their appropriate application.

The vapour compression refrigeration system is employed in the majority of building services systems’ cooling applications, and is based on the basic simplified system. (Although this article will refer to cooling systems, the same cycle and basic principles hold good for heat pump heating systems.) In a system, the cycle, will diverge from that of the simple cycle.This will depend on the specific system’s components and control, as well as levels of wasteful evaporator superheating, frictional resistances, pressure losses and heat losses. However, the fundamental process remains the same. The refrigerant transfers thermal energy between the colder evaporator and the warmer condenser by changing state both at the upper and lower pressures, generated by the compressor and enabled by the throttling device. (The basic system is discussed more fully in CIBSE Journal CPD module 2, available at cibsejournal.com)

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